


By the Sword

by JeanLuciferGohard



Category: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/F, Gen, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, someone PLEASE get this bitch a hobby, the one where harrow works out a bunch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2020-12-24 12:22:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21099401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanLuciferGohard/pseuds/JeanLuciferGohard
Summary: The Reverend Daughter of the Ninth, Necrosaint, Ascended, the greatest bone adept in an Age, does one push-up, and collapses.Harrow does not beg for her cavalier.Harrow rakes her hair back and snarls, “Nav, I am going to unzip your cranial sutures. One by one. And zip them up againsideways.”Harrow POV character study





	By the Sword

> _ I’m gonna get my perfect body back someday _
> 
> _ If not by faith, then by the sword _
> 
> _ I’m going to be restored _
> 
> Hebrews 11:40, The Mountain Goats 

* * *

**I.**

The Reverend Daughter of the Ninth does not sleep in her makeup, because that would be fucking ridiculous. The Reverend Daughter of the Ninth doesn’t _ sleep _, full stop, and if the Ninth’s most gifted bone adept uses the good setting powder, (which is traditionally cremains, but in actuality mostly just talc; the ash just makes you greasy as hell, truth be told, and the paint slides right off it), she can usually go two, maybe three days before needing to re-apply anything. Assuming she doesn’t bleed it off first. The Reverend Daughter of the Ninth has yet to find a cosmetic that the blood sweat won’t ruin.

Tridentarius, no doubt, would have at least five, but Tridentarius can fucking choke.

The _ point _ is that Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter of the Ninth, can go a couple days with the same skull painted on, and this is a good thing, because Harrowhark Nonagesimus doesn’t like to look at her own face.

It’s _ fine _ , it’s thin, and severe, and slightly inbred, the way nobility always is, but not so many generations in yet that it’s _ obvious _ . Just something slightly off about the angles, the jarringly full divot above her lip. Hollow temples. A birthmark you can only _ just _ see disappearing into her hairline. Paler eyebrows than you’d expect, considering. It’s _ fine _, it’s just that two hundred people died to make it stare out of the bathroom mirror back at her. That it all happened at once; load up the gas canisters, spread ‘em and think of the Necrolord, darling, while children twisted and gagged and died. 

It’s two hundred and one, now, which offends her aesthetic sensibilities, such as they are. It just doesn’t have the same _ finality _ to it, and being a teenage genocide is bad enough, but to be a _ sloppy _ one? Unthinkable. Trust Griddle to ruin the punchline, and the _ worst _ part is that Griddle’s is the only name she knows. She’d tried memorizing the rest, once, before dismissing the exercise as idiotic. Just too much to carry around. How the hell would you live like that. It’s all she can do to re-apply her eye-black without biting her lips bloody, scanning intently for some trace of gold in the irises.

There’s nothing, of course. 

There never is, just her own sloe-eyed, red-smeared glare, and the only yellow left is probably just vitamin deficiency. Although it could, she supposes, be _ Griddle’s _ vitamin deficiency. The _ true _mark of a Niner, more than paint could ever be.

Harrow doesn’t sleep in her makeup. Harrow doesn’t sleep. Harrow has _ shit to do _.

Harrow stalks around the airlocks of the _ Mithraeum _ , and the gravity is all wrong, which is to say that there isn’t fucking _ enough _ of it. She misses the weight of the Ninth; without it, her lungs expand and they just keeping fucking _ going _, breathing like a missed step, asthmatic and thready. And the atmo blend is different enough that Harrow’s nosebleeds are more often her sinuses screaming for mercy than necromantic exertion. 

Her limbs stretch to fill the space, weirdly attenuated after only a few months in deep space and so _ light _. Bones shouldn’t be so light. Harrow is unmoored.

Her body wants things.

This, in and of itself, is not an insurmountable problem, because _ really _, a body is just bones with variable amounts of meat in the way, and the Ninth knows bones. The bones will obey, no matter what the meat of her has to say about it. Her body wants things, and Harrow ignores it, and pulls herself around by the bones until she blacks out. That’s fine. That all makes sense. If the Necrolord wanted us to sleep, He would not have given His children stimulants in convenient chewable tablet form, and et cetera.

The _ problem _is that her body is starting to want things the Reverend Daughter doesn’t know how to ignore.

Her body wants to _ lie down _ , achingly magnetized to any horizontal surface, her body wants the weight of the Ninth, and also about seventeen blankets, and to be too young to know anything about anything, especially herself, and to _ lie down _ , and be given marrow on black bread in celebration of the birth of the Reverend Daughter, and it isn’t until she catches herself thinking of the event as “the Reverend Daughter’s birthday” instead of _ hers _ that Harrow realizes what’s happening is that she’s got _ Gideon Nav’s fucking depression _.

The Gideon Nav hiding in her bones wants to be _ held _ . Wants to be _ wanted _ , and to have her hair played with, and Harrow bites down on the inside of her cheek until she can taste blood, jabbing a brush against her eye socket and willing Gideon Nav’s ghost to _ get with the fucking program _.

Gideon Nav’s ghost fails to apprehend the fucking _ facts _ , which, for one, even if they could be held, Griddle is not her warm, brown self anymore, eye-candy melting perfectly like marrow in the mouth, Griddle is in a body with all the charm of a mummified cat. They do not have Griddle’s bizarrely affable ease, Griddle’s artless, chagrined charm, what they have is Harrow’s hot, black-eyed stare, and Harrow’s thorny defensiveness and Harrow’s ghosts. The Reverend Daughter’s understanding of social graces may be limited, and her grasp of eroticism may be entirely theoretical, but based on data painstakingly gleaned from second-hand reports of the Third, and the Fifth, and from Gideon Nav’s frankly _ astonishing _collection of pornographic literature, “bitchy, no tits to speak of, made entirely of insomniac malice and feral triangles”, is, frankly not fucking It.

Even if they could be held, who the hell would want to.

Which, and that’s the _ other _ thing, is they cannot be held. Harrow is not a girl, Harrow is two hundred (and one) dead Niners, all of them (except one) howling and outraged to be so far from home, and that’s why they can’t have nice things. Harrow’s body wants to be held, which is Griddle’s fault, because whatever is left of Gideon Nav thinks that they’re something else, like an _ idiot _. 

“Stop _ doing _ this. This isn’t your body,” Harrows snarls into her mirror. Her lips are cracked, opening into tiny red tears between the perfectly sharp lines of her drawn-on teeth. “It’s not even mine.”

Harrow belongs to the Ninth, and to the Dead, and her body can sleep when they finally take it back. It’s fine. If the Necrolord had wanted us to have unoriginal nightmares about the atrocities it took to make us, he would not have given us stimulants, in convenient chewable-tablet form. Harrow crushes caffeine pills into her meals, as if filling her bones with static will help.

But the feeling follows her around like a sore tooth, except not like that, because a sore tooth, you could _ do _ something with. Rip it out, seed a skeleton, have it drag Gideon _ fucking _Nav’s out of her by the fingernails.

Harrow’s body wants to wake up early, muscles twitching and straining at the cage of her bones like hungry animals. It wants to _ move _ , which: fine. That’s the only thing she’ll concede to it. They— _ she _ has to lift that sword, and she can’t yet. Fine. They— _ she _ will submit to the mortifying ordeal of exercise. The horror of wearing casual leggings. Harrow strips off her collar of phalanges and her corselet of ribs, her bangles and her rings, and piles it all on the dresser. Harrow sets her jaw, and seeds the door to her room with teeth and knucklebones. Harrow pushes her bed against the wall. Harrow stands in the middle of the floor, and waits for Griddle to start exercising.

Nothing happens.

“This was _ your _ idea,” she hisses.

Nothing.

Her body does not move, it doesn’t say _ traps, lats, delts, baby, give the ladies something to look at. _ It stands— _ she _ stands, ridiculous in her sock-feet, and hideously, nakedly vulnerable like snail outside its shell with nothing but a bone cuff on her left wrist, and literally _ nothing fucking happens _.

“_ Nav!” _

Her jaw hurts.

So.

So _ fine, _so she’s seen enough of Griddle doing whatever it is this is called. Harrow lowers her palms flat to the floor, and slides one foot back, tensed like a sprinter. Then the other, weight braced awkwardly between hands and tiptoes. 

The Reverend Daughter of the Ninth, Necrosaint, Ascended, the greatest bone adept in an Age, does one push-up, and collapses.

Harrow does not beg for her dead cavalier.

Harrow rakes her hair back and snarls, “Nav, I am going to unzip your cranial sutures. One by one. And zip them up again _ sideways _.”

* * *

**II.**

Harrow’s body wants things.

She ignores it.

Her hair starts to grow out, until she has to scrape it back into a stubby, ugly tuft of ponytail while she drags herself through leg day with the wavering, uncertain form of someone who had to learn it from old holos and flimsy Cohort training manuals, because the Late Gideon Nav in her wakes only to want things.

Won’t even surface to say _ it’s cool, don’t worry, it must be, like, _ ** _super_ ** _ hard to squat with that stick up your ass. _

Bitch.

Harrow’s body is hungrier than it has ever been in her entire life. It wants to eat a dessert.

She ignores it, and locks her elbows to practice lifting Gri—_ her _ sword, which she she shouldn’t, it’s terrible form, Aiglamene would beat her bloody, but it helps, letting the bones take the weight her flesh can’t. Harrow splinters her nails to the quick planting enough bone to fill the Locked Tomb three times over across the airlock separating _ her _ half of the Mithraeum from _ Tridentarius’s _ half, and jogs her circuit with her teeth bared in an agonized rictus.

Harrow’s body buzzes, all the time, like it hasn’t since she put down a particularly lurid specimen of Griddle’s pulp rags, having come to the conclusion that masturbation was certainly A Concept, but not one that _ she _ could ever entertain, being (see Fig 1, below) a vile aberration of the natural order of things, and anyway, with a face like she’s got? Why even bother. So she’d laid the whole thing to rest, rolled the rock over it, and _ now _ some secret Gideon Nav that won’t even _ talk _ to her is trying to dig it up again, and Harrow’s body _ wants _.

It wants sleep. It wants, horrifyingly, _ still _ , to be held. It _ very much _ wants her to stop doing what she’s doing, which is attempting to drag her whole weight up by the elbows until her chin crests the massive femur she’s using as a pull-up bar.

Being a lyctor is a lot like being fourteen again, apparently; sweaty and sore-jointed and constantly aware of Gideon Nav’s tits, which is to say that the Gideon Nav hiding in her bones keeps expecting her chest to hit the bar before it does, and aborting the motion.

Her arms burn. 

Her lungs burn.

Two hundred of the Ninth burned, what else were they supposed to do with them, serve them up with a side salad and a tasteful leek garnish, they’re not the fucking _ Third, _ and so they burned, and abruptly her eyes are burning, and everything is burning, and it’s not _ fair _ , Tridentarius has her own cavalier right _ there _ , even if she does walk around sometimes with ragged, purple-red lines clawed into her face like somebody’s tried to gouge her eye out, he’s _ there _ , and all Harrow’s ghosts do is make a silent, empty keening noise through the hollows of her ribs, like a dust storm on mute, and make her think about things she can’t have, doesn’t have, like Gideon, and sleep, and Gideon’s _ fucking tits, _ of all the fucking things, and as she drops to the floor, it occurs to Harrow, from a long way away, that she is possibly having a panic attack.

Somewhere else, Harrow hits the ground, and a snakey white pain crawls up her spine. Distantly, she is aware of sound like something being gutted, a ragged abattoir panting. Away from it all, huddled around her hate, Harrowhark Nonagesimus swallows and tries to remember how she used to make herself stop wanting to gnaw a limb off. Breathing exercises? Rosaries?

But mostly, and let’s be honest, it was beating the living shit out Gideon Nav, because an atrocity that doesn’t act like one is just a _ supremely _ fucked-up mortgage, and who wants to be _ that _ , and the worst part is that she can’t even bring herself to believe that any of _ this _ is hurting Griddle, ostensibly stuck somehwere inside her but somehow immune, so really, what’s the fucking point?

Harrow hauls herself up by the bones, and whispers:

“If I give you what you want, will you stop?”

Nothing.

Harrow staggers to the bathroom, and she strips herself down like someone disassembling an engine block. She does not look down.

Harrow runs the water so hot it feels like an ice bath. Her makeup sloughs off like a bruise.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus crosses her arms over her chest, stretching until she can hook the fingertips of each hand over the scrawny points of her scapulae, and holds.

Eventually, the reservoir feeding her room runs dry, and she blacks out.

* * *

**III.**

“So, don’t get me wrong, the masochism is pretty kinky, and I _ could _ be into it, but I feel like,” drawls Gideon Nav, sucking on her teeth, “we could make it sexier. More leather? Less ‘mortification of the flesh’, cause that’s just fucking depressing _ , _ like _ for real. _ We should get you some boots or something. Maybe stop wearing turtlenecks.”

Harrow’s mouth moves without her. It says:

“Nav, I am going to find the resonant frequency of your spine, and _ shake it _ until your organs boil out of your ears.”

Gideon Nav’s dead face, which has two or three angry-looking zits clustered around the edge of her jaw, splits into a broad, sunny grin.

“Of course, my charnel mistress,” Gideon Nav waggles her dead eyebrows and intones “I am yours to command. Especially if you wore, like, really tall boots and asked to be punished.”

Harrow snorts.

They aren’t in her bed. 

Or they are, but it’s somehow her bed on the Mithraeum and also her room back in Drearbruh, and also Gideon’s cot but also their shared rooms at Canaan House, and possibly one of the extravagantly sized, ludicrously plush orgy-props from one of Griddle’s titty mags, all at the same time. Harrow closes her eyes, to spare herself the awful knowledge of whether or not there’s a mirror on the ceiling. Her bones keep her upright, but only just.

Something shifts on the mattress.

Harrow squeezes her eyes shut even tighter, to spare herself the sight of Gideon’s warm palm descending on her hair, or starting to, but stopping, hovering like bird afraid to land, and the sight of Gideon’s fiery eyebrows knitting together, and the way that Gideon’s throat bobs when she swallows.

“Seriously, are you...okay?”

Harrow’s body sways, just a little, just enough to let her dead cavalier catch her, and tip them both onto their sides, slotted together like a well-made hip joint. It’s a stupid metaphor. Bones are all she knows.

“Yeah,” Gideon says conversationally, from somewhere behind her shoulder. “I kinda figured.”

Harrow says nothing, but her body holds the instinct to thrash and flee in all four hundred and two of its dead hands, and crushes it into onto nothing. Harrow’s body drags Gideon’s arm up and over her ribs, clutches Gideon’s muscled forearm to her chest. 

“If you _ ever _ speak of this, I will _ unmake _ you, Griddle.”

Her knees are tucked against Gideon’s knees. 

* * *

**IV.**

Harrow’s body wakes up, and for once, it doesn’t want anything at all. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> hit ya bitch up on [tumblr](thefaustaesthetic.tumblr.com) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/gin_n_chthonic)


End file.
